NITCH

Photo of Henry Miller

Henry Miller // "To make living itself an art, that is the goal."

Photo of Nick Cave

Nick Cave // "Although I am not an atheist myself, I have a lot of time for their position, because I do struggle with the notion of God’s existence to a certain extent. Atheists, though, fall decisively on one side of the dividing line, whereas I have moved back and forth across that line over the years... Many atheists are well informed on religion and hold a view on the significance of the nature of the theological struggle, and so I feel closer to them than I do to the spiritually complacent, the religiously dogmatic or those who are simply indifferent to these matters... But in regard to your dilemma…I can’t think of an act more generous than an atheist at prayer, who temporarily puts aside their disbelief in a god in order to bring comfort to a friend. Loosening your position for a moment, and doing something difficult because it has been asked of you by someone you care for, demonstrates a confidence in your beliefs, and shows that they are not so prideful or absolutist that they manifest into a smallness of being. Of course, to some this act will seem intellectually dishonest, a sham and a lie, but to others it will appear as the purest kindness, where heart eclipses mind, a true and complex gesture of what it means to love somebody. We show that in times of need we can do whatever is required of us, with a magnanimous heart, bending to the will of those we love. Understandably, it will be difficult for you to pray, but that is the very reason to do it. What is true friendship if we are not tested at times, if we are not prepared to soften our cherished ideals as an act of fidelity and commitment to those we love. In the end, this act of friendship may be the most eloquent prayer of all."

Photo of Robert DeNiro

Robert DeNiro // "There's no right or wrong. There's only good and bad. And 'bad' usually happens when you're trying too hard to do it right. There's a very broad spectrum of things that can inhibit you. The most important thing...is to feel loose enough to create what you want to create, and be free to try anything. To have choices."

Photo of Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac // "Everything is ecstasy, inside... Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-endings drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside...and you will remember."

Photo of George Harrison

George Harrison // "I just have a belief that this is only one little bit...the physical world is one little bit of the universe."

Photo of Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak // "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters...I sent him a card and I drew a picture...I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

Photo of Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau // "If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed."

Photo of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf // "Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."

Photo of Viggo Mortensen

Viggo Mortensen // "To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life."

Photo of Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog // "I'm trying to find these rare moments where you feel completely illuminated. Facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you, although it has factually correct entries, millions of them. But these rare moments of illumination that you find when you read a great poem, you instantly know. You instantly feel this spark of illumination. You are almost stepping outside of yourself and you see something sublime."

Photo of Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski // "Understand me...I do not have time for things that have no soul."

Photo of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison // "It’s not possible to constantly hone in on the crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic, that’s also life."

Photo of Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt // "The work I care about is terribly simple."

Photo of John Coltrane

John Coltrane // "I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing...the emotional reaction is all that matters, as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood."

Photo of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf // "I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep…animal existence."

Photo of Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin // "Patience is also a form of action."

Photo of David Bowie

David Bowie // "Never work for other people at what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself or how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations."

Photo of Claude Monet

Claude Monet // "What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence."

Photo of Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag // "I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces 'intelligence.'"

Photo of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan // "And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns...that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself."

Photo of Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith // I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are."

Photo of Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley // "There are quiet places…in the mind, he said meditatively. But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately...to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head...round and round, continually... What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night...not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep...the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we've been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows...a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying... For one's alone in the crystal, and there's no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on… There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you'd die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner."

Photo of Anais Nin

Anais Nin // "I have a kind of courage you do not understand. I am far from blind, far from indifferent, but I will not indulge in impotent, passive despair. I will not add to the despair of the world. I am working on counterpoisons… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live."

Photo of Nina Simone

Nina Simone // "I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why."